Posts in Category: how to

Benchmarking is the act of running a computer through a series of predetermined tests or program operations to assess its overall performance. With benchmarking, you can gauge the performance of your PC hardware to ensure everything is performing as designed. Think of it as putting your computer through a test that assigns a score, so that you can compare your hardware’s performance relative to other computers.

There are a variety of ways to benchmark a PC, with specific methods focusing on the PC as a whole, or specific components, such as the graphics card, CPU, or SSD. Broadly speaking, benchmarking methods fall into one of two categories: Synthetic or Real World.

The average PC user spends several hours a day touching a computer mouse, making it one of the most critical computer peripherals. And yet, few PC users spend much time considering mice before purchasing one that they’ll end up using for years.

Today, PC users have an enormous variety of mice to choose from, as well as numerous factors to consider before choosing the best mouse for them. Everyone’s hand is a little different, so it makes sense that different hands may prefer different mice.

This guide should serve as a primer to help find your hand the best possible mouse companion. We’ve separated the guide into four sections based on the four main criteria to consider when selecting a mouse: comfort, precision, button layout, and extra features.

Very few things in life are more satisfying than assembling all the parts to a new PC, hitting the power button, and watching it boot up properly.

But even if your build starts up and seems to work without problems, you might want to make sure all the components are fully functional. Does your graphics card pump out pretty pictures at the level promised by the manufacturer? Does your RAM operate consistently for hours on end? Does your CPU process the desired number of ones and zeroes under intense loads without overheating?

To answer these questions, we turn to stress testing: Making sure that all of your parts can handle the work that they’re designed to do (or overclocked to do). They might be fine under normal use, but you want to know that they’ll be able to handle heavier tasks down the road, such as high-end gaming or media editing.

As we approach the Q1 2016 release dates for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, many PC gamers are wondering how to best prepare their computer for VR gaming, while others are planning new builds from the ground up. We would know: Every year, more than a million visitors come to our website looking to build the best PC for their budget, and an increasing number of them ask us about VR headsets.

If you’re anything like us, then the graphics card is your favorite part of a computer. Graphics cards let your computer do awesome things like super complex computations, physics processing, and most importantly, producing shiny graphics in games.

So, what is a graphics card, and how do you figure out which one you should buy?

In the U.S., the best time to buy new PC parts is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Outside the U.S., you may do better with the next best: holiday season sales.

And while some might find excitement in the classic Black Friday imagery of shoppers camping out and then making a mad scramble for the electronics department, we at Logical Increments prefer to stay at home and capitalize on mega discounts the more civilized way: Glued to the internet, mashing F5 on our browsers and searching for the best deals.